At Fhior, food and wine go hand in hand. According to Stuart Skea, the restaurant’s sommelier, he works very closely with owners Scott and Laura Smith and their team of chefs to decide what does and doesn’t work. “I'll have an idea of a match and it will be sketched out,” he says. “We'll try it, we'll try some wines, sometimes the first wine you think, "Oh this is fine," sometimes it's completely wrong! It can take you two or three goes, but we don't put them on the menu until we think it's right.

“But it's fun to have the feedback because a lot of kitchens aren't interested in the wine, it's a separate thing. So it's a bit more joined up here, the kitchen is really keen to try wine. It gives them an idea of how it works with the food, and what the customers are experiencing as well.”

Fhior is a relative newcomer to the Edinburgh scene, but its ambitions are very clearly sketched out. The food is ingredient-led, very seasonal, with foraged items to the fore: it’s cooking with a light touch. There are lots of fresh, natural flavours to match the clean, bright decor. The 55-bottle wine list is selected, Skea says, to fit in with this ethos, and all of the bottles are organic. Skea used to work at Scott Smith’s previous restaurant, Norn, where the wines were “hardcore natural”, as he puts it, but Fhior is a little more relaxed.

“A good number of them are still natural,” he says, “but I'm not a fan of the more esoteric natural wines, because to me they set the taste of the process; it's just as bad as an industrially made wine. But everything is from artisanal, small-domain winemakers, and organic or better.”

The closeness of kitchen and wine cellar makes for some fascinating matches. One match - a classic lamb-Syrah combination - highlights what Fhior is trying to achieve, according to Skea. “The lamb is cooked with salt-marsh herbs, and then there are carrots which are roasted with a little sea buckthorn, so there's a lot of acidity and freshness. We've paired that with an old-vine Serine from Eric Texier in the northern Rhone: it’s light, only 12 percent alcohol. I suppose you could call it natural wine, there's no added sulphur at any point, but it's very pure, very fragrant. It's got complex aromatics and vitality. It's really my sort of wine.”

Skea has worked at a number of restaurants in the east of Scotland since a trip to Bordeaux convinced him to try a career in wine: his first job was at Malmaison in Edinburgh 11 years ago. That passion hasn’t dimmed, although his focus has broadened. “I’m really excited by some of the wines from northwest Spain, in Galicia, at the moment,” he says. “I've just put a beautiful Mencia on from Fedellos do Couto in the Ribeira Sacra, it's just very pure and bright and mineral and elegant.

“There are great things coming out of Hungary just now as well, a Blaufrankisch - Kekfrankos it's called there. We’ve got one from Peter Wetzer which is wonderful with lighter game, pigeon, that sort of thing.”

That freshness of approach reflects the restaurant’s own newness - but, as Skea points out, the kitchen has produced an impressive variety of dishes already. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “It's [The menu] has changed completely. We've only been open for not even three months, so every dish is new, some stay on for a month, some stay on for just a week or two weeks. It's a fun challenge.”

It’s clear that the aspect Skea enjoys most of all is ensuring that the food and wine matches work perfectly. The wine list is set out based on flavour (‘crisp and mineral’, ‘weighty and complex’, for example) rather than region, another nod to the significance of food matching.

“We try and make the wine pairings interesting,” says Skea. “I feel a lot of places simply tick a box and have an Alsace Pinot Gris, you know, something very classical just because if you read a book on wine and food matching that's what it would suggest.

“Occasionally I get some esoteric things; we had an orange muscat with a lobster dish. A lot of people weren't sure about it when they try it, then they try it with the food and they can see where you're coming from. We always try and keep things a little bit interesting.

“I've got a lovely Furmint on just now from Peter Wetzer which is beautiful, it's on with a charred, crispy cabbage with some truffle pecorino. It's a beautiful wine, and most people haven't tried a dry wine from Hungary. We're not looking for something esoteric for its own sake - first and foremost it works as a wine, and as a pairing, that's what we’re going for.”

About the Author

This article is written by Will Hawkes, contributing editor for Sommeliers Choice Awards. Will is also a regular contributor to The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Beer Advocate.